Boeing Starliner astronauts are coming home early

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This week, NASA announced that Boeing Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who are not stranded in space, will return early.

This comes after a post by the president accusing the previous administration of, basically, abandoning the astronauts to their fate and directing the CEO of SpaceX to bring them home.

To be clear, I am pretty certain that NASA did not accelerate Butch and Suni’s return because of this post.

Let’s discuss the long, sad tale of Boeing Starliner. If you’ve been following along this whole time, feel free to skip to the final update at the end of the newsletter.

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I was rooting for you, Boeing!

I’ve been following Boeing Starliner for almost a decade at this point, through the ups and downs of the tumultuous Commercial Crew program. This sought to return human spaceflight capability to the United States after the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. It’s been a long ride, and through much of it, I was hoping Boeing would pull through with a successful flight.

Competition in spaceflight providers is a good thing, and while it’s pretty unambiguous that SpaceX has won, I was still rooting for Boeing to succeed. When Starliner finally launched with its first astronauts on board last June, I was so relieved that I had tears in my eyes. Surely, after all this, the test flight would go well and NASA would have a second provider to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.

I can only laugh at my naïveté. And over the past eight months, this mission has transcended its small test flight status and become fodder for clickbait headlines and political stunts.

Here’s what went wrong with Boeing Starliner

Boeing’s history with spaceflight has been long — they were (and still are) NASA’s prime contractor for the International Space Station and built the bulk of the U.S. modules. In 2014, when NASA awarded the two Commercial Crew contracts, the lion’s share ($4.6 billion) went to Boeing, while SpaceX received significantly less ($2.6 billion).

At the time, the justification for the higher award for Boeing from NASA’s human spaceflight head William Gerstenmaier was that Boeing’s approach was better. They also had significant spaceflight experience, while SpaceX was still new to the game: The first successful Falcon 9 launch was in 2010, and the Dragon cargo spacecraft docked with the ISS for the first time in 2012. (Funnily enough, Gerst now works for SpaceX.)

A report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General on the state of the International Space Station last year noted that it takes, on average, eight and a half years from contract award to the first operational flight of a new spacecraft. Both these vehicles were delayed, but SpaceX’s first crewed demonstration flight was in 2020, and the first operational flight was later that year. All eyes were on Boeing to see what they’d do.

The answer is….not much. Boeing’s first uncrewed demonstration flight was in December 2019 (SpaceX’s uncrewed test was earlier in 2019). It went so poorly — to the point where software errors meant that the capsule couldn’t even dock with the ISS — that the company had to fly a second uncrewed flight. That occurred in May 2022, and it was successful, setting the stage for the crewed flight test. But that took over two years to launch.

Three launch attempts for Starliner CFT

SpaceX took just over a year between their uncrewed demonstration flight and their crewed test, so it was safe to assume Boeing would be similar, especially considering they had two uncrewed tests to work out all the kinks. But in August 2023, the company announced that the crewed test would be delayed until at least March 2024 for a few reasons — mainly problems with the parachute system and over a mile (yes a mile) of flammable tape used around wiring within the capsule that had to be removed and replaced.

We were all ready for this flight to take off, then, in March or April of 2024. But scheduling conflicts on the ISS meant that it was delayed further, to May. But the May 6 launch attempt was scrubbed due to an off-seat oxygen pressure valve on the Atlas V launch vehicle. The entire thing had to be rolled back to the Vertical Integration Facility, where they replaced the valve.

While this was happening, engineers also noticed a helium leak in Starliner’s thruster system. They monitored it and decided it was a small enough leak so as not to be a concern. Engineers chose not to fix it before proceeding with the flight because they assumed it was the result of a defective seal.

(It’s important to note two things about this leak: First, helium is notoriously tricky to work with, so it’s not surprising it was leaky. Second, helium isn’t used as a propellant, but instead to maintain pressure in the thruster system, so what they interpreted as a small one-off leak wasn’t a big concern here.)

Well, they got the launch vehicle fixed up and rolled it back out to the pad, but there was another scrub on June 1 because of a faulty power supply unit on the ground systems of the launch pad. They got that fixed, and then finally, on June 5, 2024, Starliner launched, and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief because surely, surely, things were going to go well from here.

Right?

LOL.

I don’t ever want to talk about doghouses again

It’s hard to characterize the Boeing Starliner flight as anything but a PR disaster for NASA at this point. There was a lot of complex stuff at play during this flight, and it came at a time when Boeing was in the spotlight for its shoddy practices in its aviation business. In my opinion it’s extremely unlikely that CFT would have gotten the kind of attention it did if that hadn’t been the case.

The real problems started after launch, just before the crew went to sleep: controllers on the ground detected two additional helium leaks in Starliner’s thrusters. What’s more, on approach to the International Space Station, five of the reaction control system thrusters failed. It quickly became clear that the problems within Starliner’s thruster system were myriad and complicated, and were not in fact, the result of a simple defective seal.

Once Butch and Suni were safely onboard the ISS, the crew and ground teams went to work trying to troubleshoot the problem and find the root cause of the issue. And that took months, during which the media was met with mostly silence from NASA in terms of what was going wrong and whether the crew could safely come back on Starliner.

As the eight day mission stretched on and on, the chatter around Starliner started to change in tone. It went from “we’re certain the crew will return on Starliner” to “we’re keeping our options open.” Rumors started to swirl that many at NASA were seriously concerned about the failure of the thrusters, and as a result whether it was actually safe to bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. And they still weren’t finding a root cause for the problem.

Finally, in August 2024, NASA announced that they had discovered the root cause of the problem: the thruster doghouses (there are four total on Starliner) were overheating. Basically, a Teflon seal was expanding due to heat, and that restricted the flow of propellant, which cut off the thrusters. While the helium leaks had been stable, there was still a concern that a combination of failing RCS thrusters and increased helium leaks during the deorbit burn could make for a catastrophe.

In the end, NASA decided that while the possibility of both these occurring at once was incredibly remote, it wasn’t worth the risk. (As an aside, in the midst of this situation, I wrote a whole newsletter about how NASA quantifies risk when everything they do with human spaceflight is inherently risky.) They announced in late August that Butch and Suni would return home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Boeing Starliner would return home uncrewed, and the fate of the program is still uncertain at this point.

The SpaceX rescue becomes political

Now, this is where the politics comes into the situation. There’s the whole scenario of SpaceX rescuing astronauts that Boeing “stranded” at the ISS, which has its own optics I’m not going to even get into. NASA decided to make Butch and Suni a part of the Crew-9 mission (pulling two astronauts off that flight at the last minute), and having the two Starliner astronauts remain on the ISS until that mission was scheduled to return in February.

This is the part that gets really complicated and hard to explain without context of how NASA normally operates. It’s the part that people who love clickbait headlines focus on because if you just look at the basic facts without any understanding, it seems like NASA stranded those astronauts in space. But really, this is just how NASA operates.

First, astronauts understand that missions get extended. Frank Rubio’s ISS stay was extended from six months to over a year because of problems with a leaky Soyuz capsule.

This kind of thing happens all the time, but that didn’t have Boeing and SpaceX involved at a time everyone wanted to hate on Boeing, so it got very little notice. This is part of the job they sign up for. On top of that, Butch and Suni are both retired military. They understand very well what is involved here.

Second, NASA doesn’t have the resources to have extra spacecraft lying around waiting at the ISS or on the ground for rescues. That isn’t how it works. Every person on the ISS has to have a way off Space Station in an emergency, which means Suni and Butch can’t just take someone else’s spacecraft and let them wait until a new one can be sent up. That’s why NASA opted to integrate them into another crew.

What’s more, it’s very important to NASA to do in-person handovers of crews, which means there’s some overlap on the ISS between crews. In an emergency, this isn’t strictly necessary, but the Starliner situation wasn’t an emergency. The decision they made makes sense in context, but again, not a lot of people have this context, so it quickly became overblown.

More delays, because nothing in space is simple

Well, after all of this, it wasn’t great when NASA announced that the Crew-9 return would be further delayed because of the processing involved for a new Crew Dragon spacecraft. Basically they needed more time to get this capsule ready in order to ensure an in-person handover between Crew-9 and Crew-10, so launch of Crew-10 was delayed until late March…which meant that Butch and Suni wouldn’t be coming home before late March. This happened pretty quietly in December, but it produced an audible groan from me personally because dear god, just get these poor people home so we can be done with this story.

Then the president got involved in the situation and made everything worse.

NASA sent a pretty basic statement to space reporters in response, saying, “NASA and SpaceX are expeditiously working to safely return the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore as soon as practical, while also preparing for the launch of Crew-10 to complete a handover between expeditions.” This made it clear that they were still prioritizing an in-person handover and were not in a rush to accelerate the return of Butch and Suni.

Where we are now: The return date

Well, this week, NASA announced that they would be bringing home Butch and Suni earlier than planned. This, in my opinion, is not a response to the president’s post, though honestly it can’t hurt in terms of trying to secure funding in the agency’s next budget.

NASA will attempt to launch Crew-10 on March 12 on a previously flown Crew Dragon capsule instead of the new one. That means that, weather permitting, Crew-9 (with Butch and Suni on board) will likely return home as soon as late March.

The reason for this is basically, it’s taking longer than NASA would like to complete processing of a brand new Crew Dragon spacecraft, originally intended for the Crew-10 launch. My guess is they learned that even a late March target launch date might not be feasible for this new spacecraft. Rather than further delay return of the Crew-9 astronauts, they opted instead to switch the capsules.

(NASA noted in its release about this latest turn of events that:

“The change also will allow SpaceX, which owns and operates the Dragon fleet, to complete the new spacecraft’s interior build and perform final integration activities, while simultaneously launching Crew-10 and returning Crew-9 sooner.”

I feel like this is a pointed response to the SpaceX CEO claiming that the previous administration “left” the Starliner astronauts in space, when in reality, the reason that the Crew-9 return has been pushed from February is because SpaceX is running late on processing the new spacecraft).

Whew. That’s about all I have to say here.

I really, really hope that this is the last update I send out on this Boeing Starliner flight, except to tell you that the astronauts have returned safely.

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